- A bipartisan US commission has delivered adevastating
critique of the intelligence assessment of Iraq's pre-war weapons of mass
destruction. It also implied that the country's spy agencies know "disturbingly
little" about Iran and North Korea.
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- The intelligence community was "dead wrong"
in "almost all of its judgements" about Saddam Hussein's presumed
chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programmes, declared the panel,
which was set up by President George Bush in February last year.
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- It bleakly warned that the United States "simply
cannot afford failures of this magnitude" again. And, as he formally
took delivery of the 400-page report at the White House, Mr Bush concurred,
saying that America's intelligence community - currently scattered across
15 separate agencies - needed "fundamental change". He promised
that "concrete actions" would be taken soon.
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- Like Lord Butler's report in Britain, the nine-member
commission, drawn from Republicans and Democrats, exonerates the administration
of charges that it directly asked intelligence analysts to change their
position or applied "undue influence" upon them. "We found
absolutely no instance [of that]", the panel concludes.
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- But the rest of the document was almost uniformly damning,
listing dozens of failings by a host of agencies - first and foremost the
CIA, but also including the Defence Intelligence Agency at the Pentagon,
and the top-secret National Security Agency which is responsible for electronic
eavesdropping around the world.
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- Most alarming, however, is what the report conveyed about
current US knowledge of the suspected nuclear programmes of Iran and North
Korea, which, along with Saddam's Iraq, were described as the "axis
of evil" by Mr Bush and which are under pressure from Washington to
give up their nuclear ambitions.
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- "Across the board," the report said, "the
intelligence community knows disturbingly little about the nuclear programmes
of many of the world's most dangerous actors." In some cases, said
the report, "it knows less now than it did five or 10 years ago".
However, the sections of the report specifically dealing with North Korea
and Iran are classified and are not being made public.
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- This observation will do nothing to reassure the rest
of the world that the weaknesses that led to the Iraq dÈb,cle will
not be repeated. Such public doubts from so eminent a source can only increase
scepticism over assertions from Washington about what is going on in Iran
and North Korea.
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- The commission, which was headed by a retired Republican
judge, Laurence Silberman, and a former Democratic Senator, Charles Robb,
set out 74 specific recommendations, which would change many of the ways
that the CIA has operated since it was created in 1947.
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- Most importantly, it advocated broader powers for John
Negroponte, the former US ambassador to the United Nations and currently
Washington's envoy in Baghdad, who is Mr Bush's nominee to be the first
director of national intelligence, with authority over the entire US espionage
apparatus.
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- The suggested changes included bringing the FBI's counterintelligence
and counterterrorism operations into a single office directly under the
aegis of the DNI. It also called for a new and lean National Counter-Proliferation
Centre, which would constantly monitor countries suspected of seeking nuclear
and other unconventional weapons.
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- Among other improvements, the report recommended that
confused lines of authority over information sharing created by last year's
Intelligence Reform Act, setting up the DNI, should be resolved.
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- It wants Mr Negroponte to be given control of the country's
$35bn (£18.5bn) intelligence budget, to avoid turf battles between
the DNI and the Pentagon in particular.
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- There should be a single individual under the DNI chief
who is in charge of "information sharing" and "information
security". This would help "break down cultural and policy barriers,"
the report says. It also urges creation of a Human Intelligence Directorate
within the CIA, to improve the gathering of human intelligence - an area
where the US has been weak in the cases of Iraq, Iran and North Korea.
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- The CIA and other agencies have said that internal reforms
are already under way. But the commission is unconvinced: "The flaws
we found in the intelligence community's Iraq performance are still all
too common." It urged Mr Negroponte to "hold accountable"
the organisations that contributed to the Iraq fiasco.
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- The report also dwelled at length on the need for greater
attention to conflicting views among intelligence analysts, instead of
the system which prevailed in the Iraq dÈb,cle, whereby inconvenient
or nuanced pieces of information were eliminated from an assessment as
it made its way up the bureaucratic ladder.
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- Republicans greeted the report last night as the last
word on a controversy which has been the biggest embarrassment of the Bush
presidency thus far. But Democrats insisted that the White House should
not escape unscathed. Harry Reid, the Senate minority leader, said: "Senior
policymakers should be held accountable for their actions as well."
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- ©2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.
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- http://news.independent.co.uk/
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